These guys are the kind we need more of. Dwarf Fortress is very much a labor of love and well worth the price on Steam. They have over 20 years of development put into it and even though the steam version got a fresh coat of paint, the text mode version is still free.
Anyone curious about Dwarf Fortress should check out Kruggsmash on Youtube. He has been making Dwarf Fortress videos for years and really does a good job of revealing the stories that evolve during gameplay.
When they accidentally killed cats by alcohol overdose by having them lick their paws and not considering they might step in ale.
I mean, if you don’t see the beauty in that I don’t know what to tell you…
Or when dwarves would go blind because they had liquid in their eyes and no way to get it out. Dwarves have eyelids because of that.
The text version isn’t just still free. It’s free and getting active updates. It actually got a significant number of updates and bug fixes that came along with the Steam version being released. These dudes are legends.
Wow, really? Might give it another whirl then, it was still a bit rough cut when I played it back in the Boatmurdered era.
The steam release came with a lot of cleanup. It’s a bit less than it was right before but it’s more accessible. Still quite difficult to learn the ins and outs, I think it took something like 30 forts before I had royalty move in. But the game is all about learning through failure, it’s just difficult to find where that failure is most times, lots of pausing and reading to track down which dwarves are having issues with what.
It took me longer than I like to admit to realize that reading a lot was key to knowing what would keep the dwarves happy.
